


maybe the atlantic would have been kinder

by boarsnsmores



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Red Queen - Freeform, it's not super graphic but tagging just in case, not dark!Ruby but maybe jaded!Ruby?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-29
Updated: 2016-04-04
Packaged: 2018-05-24 00:25:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6135181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boarsnsmores/pseuds/boarsnsmores
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wonders who Ruby Lucas was, that these roles become her, skin and mask a perfect fit and bile in her throat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Going to interrupt myself to give a quick shoutout to the people leaving comments. I tried to respond to them but I'm an introvert who's idea of socializing is going to the grocery store an hour before closing and using self-checkout. So, thanks, I super appreciate you taking the time to write something and if you were looking for a response, I will 100% respond to private messages. Sorry about not responding to comments. :(
> 
> All [racethewind10's tag fic's fault](http://racethewind10.tumblr.com/post/137958460241/lumadreamland-once-upon-a-wardrobe). This was supposed to be a Red Queen one shot but I’m 1.5k words into part ii and two scenes into part iii so whoops.
> 
> Takes place in poorly remembered canon and drives canon right off a cliff, so, vague fanon. Maybe between S1/2?

**part i. the cage rattles empty, key forgotten and gate unguarded**

She blinks her eyes and the road comes back into focus. Sort of - there's a tree blocking the view. There's nothing in her rear-view mirror but thick forest framing a road and a sign that reads 'End of Road'. She can't remember what she thought she was doing out here, thinks she must have taken a wrong turn somewhere but when she thinks harder, she can't remember where she was trying to go either. She lets the thought go though - she's Ruby Lucas and she's made a life out of wandering, ever since she drove out of small town life on a Camaro bought with every dollar she'd ever made working in that diner. At least, that's what she thinks she remembers as something bright red drips down her temple. Blood, her blood, and she shivers at the sight.

It pulls at something in her and she thinks she should see a doctor about her injuries - easier said than done when her car is now part tree and there's apparently no signal this far out.

A mile or so out, a gas station receives a woman who appears to have sustained no injuries, but enters the mart with dried blood on her skin and bloodstains on her shirt. She tells the paramedics her name, Ruby Lucas, but can't provide any sort of identification nor any contact information. State databases have no record of a Ruby Lucas and the woman either cannot or will not disclose anything else. The police question her about the blood, but it's her own even if the timeline doesn't add up. They eventually release her because there's no evidence of a crime and other things to think about.

Someone will find a Camaro, a week or so from this incident, but the plates don't match any registrar and it's too badly damaged to do anything but haul it to a junkyard. They clean it out beforehand though and donate whatever they find. The wolf charm sells for a dollar at the local Goodwill, 50% off all bric-a-brac. There's blood on the wheel and it matches a Ruby Lucas but last any heard of her, she was headed west and gone in the wind by Ohio.

Ruby Lucas walks out of the police station with nothing but the clothes on her back and her name in her head and the latter is debatable. It's an okay name, she thinks, thumb sticking up as she waits on the side of a road near a rest stop. Almost right, she thinks, but she can't quite pinpoint why it's not all right. Good enough, she thinks when an 18-wheeler rumbles to a stop in front of her, to get her where she's going next.

She shrugs when he asks her where she's headed.

"Wherever you're going" she tells him instead.

Ohio it is.

She takes on a waitressing job in Ohio because it's familiar and no one asks too many questions because no one ever really sees her. The drug business thrives in Ohio just like it does everywhere else and the people who do drugs know people who sell drugs and they know people who forge papers.

Scarlett Lucas leaves Ohio in a rust bucket that's not in her name. She's headed west and she thinks she won't stop until the roads become dirt overlooking the ocean crashing against the world and maybe even then she'll just keep driving. Maybe if she drives long enough and fast enough she'll glimpse parts of herself lying on the side of the road, waiting for her to find them again.

She can't remember her life before the Accident (always with a capital 'A') but she grasps at what she can. Like fumbling for the light switch, she thinks, to push away the emptiness of the dark but she's not sure she wants the unwavering reality of seeing either.

In Wisconsin, she stops at a kitschy gift store and trawls its aisles looking for something to make the rust bucket feel a little more like home. She falters at a small wooden relief of a wolf and the moon. Her hand hovers over it and something in her blood arcs, sparking through her nerves like she imagines lightning striking would. But it also chills her bones, cold enough to burn her alive, settles in her between the grooves of muscle and sinew, visceral and terrifying.

She stays away from wolves after that.

In North Dakota the money she earned in Ohio runs out and she picks up work in a dive bar. She rents a couch from one of the regulars and pays him in cash and a heavy hand for his drinks. They like her there, like that she can pour drinks like "one of them fancy Vegas bars," like her pretty face and pretty legs, like her good ear and how she always says the right thing, like how little space she takes in their minds. It's familiar and there's something she thinks is comfort in that, but not much. Not enough to fill the emptiness she thinks will swallow her whole one day at any rate. She leaves before the second full moon passes and they don't remember her being here either.

She wonders who Ruby Lucas was, that these roles become her, skin and mask a perfect fit and bile in her throat.

It's like trying to piece together a puzzle, but she's lost the big picture and the pieces she has actually come from five puzzles. All that's left is to rearrange the pieces into something palpable and this metaphor is bullshit.

She hitches a ride to the border of Oregon and Washington, watching the road pass by way of the sky. She's lying in the bed of a pickup truck because there wasn't any room in the cab. It's very blue, the sky, and today is a cloudless day. If she focuses until she can't feel the tires slipping on asphalt, it's like she's not moving at all.

They stop at diner and she thinks she'll head south from here. She thanks them for the ride and bums a smoke off of them. Each pull burns at her lungs but she finishes the stick anyway, watching the smoke curl into the trees and disappear into the setting sun, floating in the wind until the wind pulls it apart.

She thinks John Mellencamp's got the right idea as his voice warbles through the roadside diner's cheap speakers, tinny and staticky, _life goes on, even after the thrill of living is gone_. She drinks the sludge they call coffee and swallows his words too, bitter and cold.

Vegas keeps her for a little longer. It doesn't itch at her skin the way small towns did, doesn't make her want to claw at herself until she bleeds her secrets, seeping out from the walls. There's something to be said about losing herself in the crowd, especially when the crowd changes every weekend. She's as much a fixture as her patrons and they all drift together in the sea of hazy hedonism, unmoored and uncaring as they become lost.

Vegas is a city of magic. Magic doesn't exist, of course, but a magician has a way of making their audience believe, if only for a moment, and happy to have been deceived. Like the magician, Vegas thrives on its visitors casting aside reality for grandiose but inevitably empty promises. Scarlett's no different - she flirts with vigor, draws her prey in with glancing touch and honeyed words from a silver tongue, narrows their world until it's only her, and leaves them breathless when she disappears into the crowd again, their pockets even lighter than Vegas would have left them.

_It's something_ , she'll shrug, when her coworkers tell her they've heard the stories of a woman with red in her hair who they swear was a goddamn goddess walking among mortals. That's all it ever is, and it does nothing to stop the ache in her bones.

She runs on those nights, when her bones feel like they don't belong in her skin, runs until her knees burn red with pain and her legs give out. Only then, when she's on the ground with sand and gravel between her fingers and the moon on her back, does the howling in her bones stop. She does not belong here, she knows, but she doesn't belong here less than she didn't belong anywhere else.

She's not surprised when she leaves a month later. There was nothing of her to find in Vegas. A patron will wander into her old bar and ask about a woman who had smiled the innocence of sheep but, he had realized far too late, had moved with the guile of the wolf and spoke with its fangs and that there had never been a sheep, only a sheepskin of the dead (he actually only drunkenly slurs out _where's 'at bisch_ ). The bartender will shrug and tell him, _before my time_.

She thinks maybe she should have headed east, as she sits on the hood of her latest rust bucket and drinks a flat beer, watching the Pacific Ocean. It ebbs and flows, and each time it pulls away there's a little less cliff than there had been before. Maybe the Atlantic would have been kinder.

The sun is rising and she watches its beams filter through the amber of her bottle. It casts a dark shadow on her arm, reminds her of color from a time she can't remember and she squeezes at the bottle hard enough to shatter it. The blood drips down her hand, bright and red like it's always been and she thinks of a sign that read 'End of Road'. She doesn't know if she's running away from something or toward something else.

By the time she finds parking in Los Angeles, the cuts have healed and she's pushed that morning from her mind. There's a hole in her, that's maybe shaped like Ruby, where something else has taken residence. Perhaps it has always been there, in the corners that being Ruby couldn't fill, waiting deep in slumber until there was room for it to grow. It stalks her, a shadow always in the corner of her eye, but she's too afraid to turn her head and face it. She wants answers on her own terms, answers that fit into the puzzle she's trying to put back together, whose pieces slip out of their place just as quickly as she can fit them together.

For as many bars as there are in Los Angeles, there are twice as many jobless and pretty faces. Scarlett might know enough drinks to write her own book but it doesn't help when the girl in front of her knows someone who knows someone and Scarlett's just a nobody who rode in on a rust bucket that screeched its way to an impound lot.

She visits a seedy bar on the outskirts of downtown with a sign in its window that reads 'HIRING' in messy Sharpie. Some drunkard makes a pass at her and won't take no for an answer because he's god's gift to the world and she's so very tired of smiling and pretending like she's someone she's not. Her hand curls into a fist and he doesn't get up when she decks him in the face. He's bleeding, the red sickly and dark in this light and the urge to hit him again overwhelms her. But just like she knows Scarlett isn't Ruby and neither of them are just pretty faces who don't take up much room in other people's minds, she knows this isn't her either, so she curls and uncurls her fist until her breathing calms and she can move without wanting to bleed him dry.

The bartender stares at her when she enters and his eyes narrow when she tells him she wants a job. He tells her that her shift started two hours ago and that she'd better not be late tomorrow; he's not paying her to not work. She laughs and feels more like herself than she has this entire year, than this entire lifetime even.

She's still a pretty face and pretty legs and she still pours drinks like she'd been born with a tumbler in one hand and a shaker in the other. But here, here she takes no shit from her patrons. This is her territory and she makes sure everyone knows it. They whine at her like sad dogs when she cuts them off but know better than to push the issue - Scarlett carries more strength than her thin frame would suggest and she has no qualms about bodily throwing them out.

This feels real, she thinks, but when she returns home to her apartment (the upstairs level rented from her boss - bartender, owner, and unapologetic benefactor of rent control laws), she stares at the empty room from her mattress and thinks of blood, sometimes sickly and dark, sometimes too bright, but never enough. And she'll stare at her hand against the sterile light flickering through her ceiling fan and watch as it clenches into a fist, unclenches into her hand, again and again until she wakes up the next morning.

Something else rakes at her now. It is not the cloying itch of small towns, nor the claws against her skin of the big city, nor the ache in her bones that howl for the moon and the ground beneath her limbs. This one nests itself squarely behind her eyes and while she can turn her head away from the shadow that lives inside her, this colors every breath she takes, haunts every waking moment. She closes her eyes and hears it baying for the hunt.

When she sees people now, she sees their throats first, torn open by her claws and her teeth, limbs torn asunder, skin hanging loosely from sinew, bodies bleeding out bright and sickly. She has to look away. This is not a land of violence, not in the way she needs it to be - where the meaning of her life could be pried from the cold fingers of the unworthy and weak as they bled out in front of her.

Maybe this is why Ruby hid herself. She has let something out and now she does not know how to put it back into its cage, if she even can. Perhaps she has opened Pandora's Box and there is no turning back, only living with it. But she does not even know what 'it' is, still too afraid of a shadow cast the in shape of things that go bump in the night in the forests of her dreams.

But, she is still Scarlett nee Ruby and she can wear second skins as though they were her own even though they feel like grease and snake oil. She survives, day by day, until she can live with whatever darkness has filled the emptiness in herself. This is enough, she thinks. This is as good as it'll get for someone like her.

She can live like this, she thinks, until someone stumbles into her bar, who looks tired, weighed down by living in a world he does not belong to like she does not belong, and gazes at her with a face she's seen in the mirror every day ever since she fell into Los Angeles and made someone bleed. Her mask must slip because there's recognition in his face too but he says nothing, only asks for a pint of whatever's on tap. He downs it in one swing and when he pays her, in grubby ones, there's a scrap of an old receipt nestled in between with a place and time scrawled next to an order of General Tso's Orange Chicken. He's gone by the time she finds it.

She's not naive - the naive are trampled underfoot in this land and this piece of paper sets off all kinds of alarms in her head. But when she looks in the mirror that night, her teeth are too blunt and too white and she feels oddly disappointed when she tugs at her mouth and finds nothing underneath her too-human jaw. That something she pretends does not exist stirs within her and she supposes that whatever's in that suspicious back-alley, it cannot be worse than what she carries with her.

She smells it before she finds the entrance, blood and sweat so strong it makes her reel backward as much as it draws her forward. The bouncer at the door gives her a look, casting judgement on her for belonging to the wrong world and she glares right back, willing viciousness into a face that has trained itself to demure and blur in the memories of others. He relents and she brushes past him into a world she thought couldn't exist in a land like this one.

She pushes to someone who looks like he's in charge, judging by the amount of money he's currently counting and demands to be let into the ring. He barely looks at her before scoffing and turning back to his earnings. She shoves him against the wall, bares her too-blunt teeth at him, and tries not to tear his throat out.

_Your funeral_ , he says. When she steps into the ring, the aimless din of the crowd dies down to a surprised hush, only to grow into restless jeering that quiets again when she lands a solid haymaker into her opponent's jaw, a chip of a tooth flying into the audience.

They know her name after this night, call it out to her when she returns - Red, like the blood she mercilessly teases out of her ring mates. It fits her in a way Scarlett and Ruby do not because Scarlett and Ruby are names of the world in which she cannot belong and Red belongs to this world of bloodlust and violence. They like her here, not just for her pretty face and pretty legs, but also because she hits harder than she lets on and keeps fighting until they have to pull her away from a quivering pile of something human. When they call out her name, in the ring or as she weaves through the bodies, she can bare her fangs and it's like coming home.

In the ring, she finds all the pieces of herself that she needs. When she looks in the mirror, there's blood in her mouth that stains her teeth and no shadows in the corner of her eyes.

Her bones fit in this skin when she's in the ring and breathing in the scent of base and primal and she thinks, she's finally found herself. Here, she drinks in the fights, sees nothing but bleeding bodies and broken bones where she should see people. Here, they celebrate her for it and she can belong in this world, does belong in this world. One night, twice a month, she does not feel empty or wanting.

Scarlett had been wrong - this is exactly who she is.

(The seasons change twice before she finds out that Scarlett had only been half-wrong but also entirely right)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not dead, just slow. Real life and all that fun jazz.
> 
> This was supposed to be a quick interlude, but apparently it's now a full-blown chapter. What do.
> 
> Finally getting into the Red Queen stuff, sort of.
> 
> I don’t remember enough about canon, so someone should correct me if I’ve blatantly mis-characterized someone for the current point in the plot. I’m stretching out the timeline though because it’s not like the show’s timeline makes that much sense.

**part ii. a story is as much its absence as it is its presence**

Regina doesn’t have much reason to visit the town these days, what with the abrupt end of her reign as mayor and the entire town a hairsbreadth away from devolving into an angry mob gathered on her front lawn (again). She does occasionally visit the grocery store though, because food doesn’t appear out of thin air (she could conjure it but she’d promised Henry that she’d avoid using magic and the looks at the grocery store aren’t such a terrible price for her redemption).

Beyond that, she spends her days sifting through libraries of arcane books, chasing any hint of feasible travel between realms and cleaning the mansion when she can’t read the symbols anymore. She doesn’t think her banisters have been this clean since she first shaped this town. Some days, she’ll stand in the doorway of Henry’s room, stare at his unmade bed and scattered comics and toys. If she just stares, it looks like he never left. If she’s desperate, she can pretend it still smells like he lives here too. She doesn’t dare enter, doesn’t dare clean - there’s little sense in ruining this small grace of an illusion for the temporary salve of Lysol.

Henry comes to visit, once a week if she’s lucky. Under David’s guarded supervision, they converse idly and Regina grasps at what little of his life he offers. For everything he tells her, she can hear the ten things he doesn’t. At least there’s something, she supposes. More days than not, it only serves to make his absence that much more severe.

Between the weighty silence of the mansion and her distaste for seeing anyone besides Henry, it’s a month before her isolation becomes too much and she decides to visit Granny’s. It won’t be much, but the fear she’s sure to muster is better than the nothing she has right now.

When she opens the door, she expects the immediate quiet and the suspicious stares from the other patrons. She expects the hesitant waitress who fearfully skitters up to her to ask her for her order. She does not, however, expect to hear the slam of a plate on the counter. When she looks up, she sees Granny, gripping the plate so hard that Regina’s afraid she’ll crack it and glaring in her direction. It’s one of the most judgmental and angry glares she’s ever been on the receiving end of.

Regina would say it was unwarranted, but she suspects that Granny’s still miffed over the entire curse ordeal. When the plate comes, delivered by that skittish waitress, she eyes her (somewhat charred) food with some trepidation about wayward bodily fluids.

* * *

The next time she comes in, only two more weeks have passed. She approaches the endeavor with better planning this time, making sure her appearance coincides with Henry’s. She smiles at him when he waves at her and he whispers to David before making his way over to her.

“Hello, Henry. How have you been?” She greets as he slides into the seat across from her.

“Good. David’s teaching me how to swordfight. He says I’m a natural. S’cool to see you out.” He says, waving to the waitress who veers from David and Snow’s table to drop off Henry’s hot chocolate.

She’s about to voice her disapproval (for it to be ignored but it’ll make her feel somewhat better) when Henry takes a sip of his hot chocolate and she instead asks, “No cinnamon anymore?”

Henry shrugs, “Ashley never remembers,” and moves on to talk about his latest school project. She tries to follow along, but something in the back of her mind keeps drawing her away from the conversation and in the end, she just lets Henry talk through his drink. He leaves when he’s finished, promising to visit that weekend. She makes a mental note to pick up some groceries for lasagna before turning her attention to that prickling feeling in the back of her mind. It’s the feeling of knowing that something’s off combined with the inability to pinpoint it, like returning home to her furniture shifted an inch to the left but unable to say for certain that it wasn’t like that when she left.

Something’s missing, so small that she wouldn’t notice its absence if she wasn’t so focused on finding it. It’s not until Ashley passes her again, with stuttered step and halting words, that she realizes it. Ashley may work at the diner, but her presence within it is an incongruous one, an offbeat refrain where instead there should be a lilting cadence.

Where Ashley fumbles with orders and plates with equal incompetence, Ruby would have swept through with a preternatural grace and an easy smile. Watching Ashley now, Regina isn’t sure how she hadn’t noticed Ruby’s absence earlier and thinking on it now, can’t recall when she last saw her.

There’s no Camaro parked in front of the diner and there wasn’t one the last time she visited (she’s sure she would have remembered that glaring shade of red). The last time she saw that eyesore, it’d been parked down the street from the mansion, the night and sodium lights doing little to dull that stubborn color. She knows Ruby had been watching her and maybe if Regina were a kinder person she would have acknowledged it, but she hadn’t and when the Camaro stopped showing up, she’d just assumed that Ruby had finally given up.

She’d also thought it a small grace that Ruby wasn’t working a shift either time she’s come in, but coupled with Granny’s persistent glaring and the consistently overcooked food, she’s starting to think it’s not simply coincidence.

She hasn’t seen Ruby for some time, but then again, she hasn’t really seen anyone besides Henry for some time either. It could still be coincidence, she thinks, it’s not like she’s made an effort to find Ruby. It could be something innocuous like Ruby avoiding her just like she’d avoided Ruby right after the curse broke. There’s only one way to find out for sure, she thinks grimly, and gets up to see Granny.

She brushes past Ashley, who meekly gives a token protest but makes no effort to stop her. The other patrons are watching her now, but David had left with Henry and no one else is brave enough to stop her either. Inside the kitchen, Granny cooks alone and while she notices Regina’s entrance, judging by the slight skip in her rhythm, she doesn’t deign to give Regina her attention.

Regina waits a minute before she decides she doesn’t care.

“Where’s Ruby?” She asks bluntly.

Granny does still at this (that pancake will be slightly burnt) and finally, finally, looks up at Regina with eyes still viciously angry.

“Wouldn’t you like to know.” She says and goddamnit, Regina doesn’t have the patience to deal with Granny being difficult. She throws up her hands and bites back, “Yes, Granny, I would like to know. Generally speaking, this is why people ask questions. To get answers. I would like an answer.”

That pancake is going to be inedible at this rate. “You didn’t seem to care three months ago.” Granny says to a burnt pancake.

“Three...months?” Regina asks.

“Drove out of here on that Camaro of hers. Even stopped by your place one last time before she left. Not that you cared, not that anyone cared.” Granny says, finally giving up on the pancake and tossing it.

“Well, why didn’t you stop her?” Regina asks, incredulous. She can’t imagine Granny would just let Ruby leave, but here they are.

“Well, why didn’t you?” Granny counters and Regina has nothing to say to that.

Because she didn’t know, Regina thinks, but that’s her own fault, isn’t it? She would have stopped Ruby if she’d known, wouldn’t have just let her leave Storybrooke. It’s not right, she thinks, Ruby should be here with them not out there doing gods know what. Her nails dig into her palm at the thought.

Granny takes Regina’s silence as a sign to continue, “And what could I have said? There wasn’t anything for her here in Storybrooke. Asking her to stay would’ve been selfish and that girl’s given enough of herself for other people. Leaving might’ve been the first thing she’s ever really done for herself and I wasn’t going to take that away from her.”

Whatever anger Regina had managed to build up deflates immediately and her hands go limp at her side. Granny’s right, of course. In truth, Regina hadn’t bothered because Regina hadn’t ever thought that Ruby would leave, had taken her presence in their lives for granted. She always assumed that when she was ready to talk to her again, Ruby would be there, waiting. Even now, she wants Ruby back for her own reasons, hadn’t even given thought to what Ruby would want and finds herself shamed for the carelessness.

It’s not a particularly pleasant feeling.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Regina asks.

Granny scoffs, “You didn’t seem to care. Ruby might think she’s clever, but I knew, every time she snuck out of the bed and breakfast, she was going to see you, watching to make sure your own stupidity didn’t kill you. Same as I knew that every time she snuck in again, you hadn’t bothered to see her back. She cried some of those nights, you know. Girl isn’t as strong as she’d like to pretend. You’d broken her heart enough times and I wasn’t going to give you the chance to break it again. Wasn’t going to give you the chance to win that fool girl over again either, you don’t deserve it.”

It’s not like Regina quite disagrees with Granny, but she’s not going to let Granny decide her complicity in this. “Been waiting a while to say that, have you?” Regina asks dryly.

“Ever since the two of you started sharing a bed,” Granny agrees and Regina decides that they’re not getting into that.

“Is she...okay?” Regina asks, unsure of who Ruby is now. She imagines small town Ruby, who always wanted to see the big cities but could never muster up the courage, lost in the world and drowning in its undertow. She doesn’t know how much of Red survived the town line. She hopes enough to keep Ruby alive.

“Not sure,” Granny admits, the worry leaking into her voice, “haven’t gotten a single postcard or call. Don’t want her back here if she doesn’t want to be back here, but I’d sleep easier knowing she was finding what she needed to find out there. But that’s all wishful thinking, isn’t it? She crossed the town line and we all know what that means. My girl’s never coming back, is she?”

Were it anyone else, Regina would agree, but Regina has spent her life clawing at the infinitesimally possible and this is not something she cannot reach.

“I’m going to find her,” Regina says, tone brooking no argument.

Granny looks at her, really looks at her, and says, as though that had been a given, “See that you do.”

Neither of them talk about what they’ll do if Regina finds her - neither of them want to take responsibility for this selfishness.

* * *

A locator spell would be easiest. To cast it though, she requires supplies that have long since been confiscated. She will need to ask for, as unbecoming as the thought is, permission.

Gods, the indignity of it all.

When Henry visits next, she excuses herself and David to the study. He follows her warily, hand on the hilt of his sword as though this is all part of her nefarious scheme. The thought makes her roll her eyes. As if she would do anything with Henry in the house.

“I need my ingredients back.” She tells him.

“Did you find a way home for them?” He asks, as hopeful as he’s always been.

“No.” and he furrows his eyebrows, looking dumbly confused. It quickly gives way to his default suspicion.

“What do you need them for then?” He asks, still somewhat dumbfounded, like he can’t quite believe she would ask him instead of just taking what she needed.

She can’t believe it either, but she remembers Henry in the other room and she would give so much more to have him in her life again.

“A locator spell. I’m sure the name gives it away, but just in case the dirt between your ears can’t comprehend it, I need to find someone.” 

She can literally see his mind running, like the hamster wheel of the ill-advised hamster they once owned, “Who could you possibly need to find? It’s not like you have anyone who-”

He wisely does not finish that thought.

“Ruby,” she says, “She left.”

Those eyebrows furrow again, “No she didn’t. We just saw her-”

She waits for him to finish thinking and wonders if she can make herself a cup of tea in that time.

“Okay,” he finally says and then, more gently than she thought he could be toward her, “Do you-” he hesitates, “do you think there’s still a Ruby to find?”

The town line is a cloying weight between them.

“I don’t know,” she admits, too much honesty and openness in this moment, “but I’m going to find out, one way or another.”

He doesn’t say anything to this, and she wonders if he knew, who she and Ruby had been for each other. Perhaps he saw himself in her in that moment. She brushes him off when he awkwardly tries to lay a hand on his shoulder and he graciously retreats, promising to take her to the storehouse the next day.

David finds Henry on the way out, who shyly makes his way into the study.

“Henry.” She says and she’s not surprised in the slightest because of course Henry has been eavesdropping. He’s always hated not knowing.

He doesn’t say anything, just worries his lip as he thinks and she waits for him to finish his thought.

He settles on, “I hope you find her.” And then, “Will you tell her I’m sorry?”

“For what?” She asks as she hugs him, although she suspects she already knows.

“Forgetting.” His voice is muffled against her blouse and oh, he’s growing up without her and the thought hurts like a mortal blow.

“Of course.” She chokes out, “I’ll be sure to tell her that first.”

He shakes his head, “You first.”

* * *

She arrives at Granny’s first thing in the morning and demands access to Ruby’s old room. Something for the locator spell to latch onto, she tells Granny. Granny gives her the keys with no complaint, save for a stern warning that she’ll know if Regina goes where she shouldn’t.

Honestly, Regina thinks, it’s like they don’t trust her.

She finds Ruby’s room at the bed and breakfast easily enough - the letters have long since peeled away, but the adhesive stubbornly spells out ‘RUBY’ in whimsical block letters. She can almost imagine a teenage Ruby pasting these onto the door, the letters as obnoxious a color as her car. Perhaps pink. With glitter. It would be a fond thought, if there had ever been a teenage Ruby that grew up in Storybrooke. There hadn’t though and there is no sense in mourning a past that never was.

She isn’t sure which item in this room was closest to Ruby. There are well-thumbed through books - travel guides and fantasy that Ruby had never actually thumbed through, awards and certificates she’d never earned, posters she’d never put up. It all paints a picture of Ruby, albeit a flat one - monochrome in the face of the vivid colors that Regina’s come to associate with Ruby.

Nothing here will help her; the notepad Ruby had used at the dinner was hers more than anything here. Maybe she should have just grabbed that, even if it was probably Ashley’s now. Frowning, she sits on the bed and when her feet come to rest at its base, she hears a thud where there shouldn’t be one.

It’s a chest, filled with old Halloween costumes and at the top of the pile sits a red cloak, corners frayed with wear and flecks of Storybrooke embedded in the worn velvet where it must have been dragged. It’s not _the_ red cloak, that wouldn’t have made it to this world, but it’s the only scrap of truth in this farce.

When she returns the keys to Granny, Granny nods approvingly at the cloak, “I remember Ruby running around all day in that cloak. Little Red Riding Hood on her way to see Granny. She pretended to be the wolf too. Sometimes both at the same time. It wasn’t real, but I guess the truth was always there anyway.”

No matter what falsehoods Ruby had been made from, there’d also been something of Red in her that couldn’t be denied. Regina allows a small smile at this; she’s counting on it.

* * *

David watches her when she casts the locator spell. She really needs to have a talk with these people about their blatant trust issues.

“Are you sure this’ll work?” He asks her.

“No,” she says, “but have some faith. It’s all you’re good for, really.”

She watches the globe intently for that pinprick of light that’ll tell her where Ruby is. A moment passes, then a few moments, then a minute.

“I don’t think it worked.” David says.

“Thank you, Charming, for pointing out the obvious. Another skill to add to your long list of useless talents.” She snaps out. It comes out a little more frustrated than she’d like and much to her annoyance, he takes it in stride.

“Maybe she doesn’t want to be found.” He suggests, too kindly.

“Magic doesn’t work like that.” She snarls back.

He shrugs, “Maybe not, but you’ll find her.”

It’s not pity, she tells herself. He has to believe in her ability to find Ruby because it means that he can still believe she’ll find Snow and Emma.

* * *

She doesn’t find Ruby.

No locator spell she tries works, nor any variation or generous interpretation thereof. She’s beginning to think that David may have been right, perhaps there is no Ruby to be found. On those days, when she starts believing it, she visits Granny’s right before closing. Granny will pour them both a stiff drink and together, they’ll drink to the missing.

* * *

When magic fails her, she resorts to more mundane techniques, taking weekends to fly to cities she thinks Ruby may have gone to. There had been posters of New York City on Ruby’s walls and Regina flies there to wander in its streets, but there are too many bodies for anyone to have remembered a single face. It’s the same in every city. She hadn’t realized this world was so large, too large to comprehend it from figures in a book.

(She stops herself before she can imagine Ruby in this world, drifting away lost and unmoored, unable to find purchase on solid ground. It does not occur to her to think that Ruby would have chosen it.)

While paying for gas at the gas station right before Storybrooke on her way back from an airport, she remembers to ask the attendant, “Have you see this person?”

He looks at the picture on her phone for a moment. “Hey, yeah,” he says, and Regina cautiously hopes.

The officer in the precinct listens to her story (dramatically tragic and utterly false) and calls his partner over, “Didn’t we take this case?” He asks her, “The one with the blood we couldn’t figure out. And the Camaro.” (It’s her, Regina thinks, she’s found her.)

The female officer squints at the smartphone, “Kind of looks like her. Lucas? That name ring a bell?”

Regina nods, not trusting herself to do anything else and asks, voice trembling despite her efforts, “Do you know where she went?”

The male officer looks at her with pity, “Sorry, ma’am, last we found out, she went to Ohio and hasn’t been seen since. There weren’t enough resources to look into it when no crime had happened.”

(Regina wants to rage at these people for not caring enough to look harder.)

(Herself too, if she’s being honest.)

* * *

Emma and Snow find their way back to Storybrooke before Regina finds Ruby.

“Party’s tomorrow. You’re early.” Granny tells her, setting two glasses down.

“Not a party I’m welcome at, I’m sure.” She says and drinks to the missing, shot burning down her throat until it settles in her empty stomach, a harsh warmth.

“And besides,” she says bitterly, “I still have work to do.”

Granny doesn’t say anything and Regina’s grateful for the silence. They drink to the missing, but Regina would be lying if she said she didn’t sometimes think they were drinking to mourn the dead.

* * *

“So, uh, how’s it going? The thing with Ruby.” Emma asks her awkwardly one day.

“Honestly, does Storybrooke have nothing better to do than gossip about me?” Regina asks, exasperated. She doesn’t actually care, but she also doesn’t care to bother dealing with it either.

“No, but in this case, Henry told me. Asked if I could help, actually. I could put some calls into some old friends, if you’d like? See if they could pick up on her trail.”

Regina warily eyes Emma, who shrugs in response, “She was my friend too.”

Emma’s contacts don’t find Ruby past Ohio either and Regina’s out of options.

* * *

When Granny sees her come in, right before closing, she moves to pull out their customary two glasses.

“I couldn’t find her.” Regina says, still standing in the doorway.

Granny looks at her for a moment, bottle of scotch in hand. She doesn’t pour the glasses, but she sets the bottle on the counter before leaving.

Regina doesn’t think she’ll be welcome at Granny’s for some time after that, but Henry insists they eat there one day and Regina’s food isn’t burnt.

She supposes that it was enough for Granny that she had tried all this time.

Regina would grieve, but to do so would make it absolute and she can’t do that, not yet. 

Ashley stops tripping as much, but the shyness in her voice never goes away and when Regina sees Ashley, she only sees how Ashley could never be Ruby. When she steps onto Main Street, she sometimes expects to turn a corner and see a red Camaro parked poorly in the no-parking zone. It still surprises her to see the no-parking zone properly empty and she has to reorient herself once more.

Some nights, she stands at the border, right to the side of the road, to see if she can’t catch a car, as gaudy as that red Camaro, speeding into her town and breaking three ordinances doing so.

The car never comes and the rest of the year passes with little fanfare.

(Regina does not allow herself the luxury of forgetting.)

* * *

They’ve settled into this strange family unit, she, Henry, and Emma. Henry alternates weeks between them and they all share a night every Saturday where Henry will pull out a board game or Emma will pick a random movie to watch and together, they'll enjoy the peace.

“Look, I’m telling you Regina, you can’t go wrong with giant robots smashing up giant monsters. You just can’t.” Emma says, waving _Pacific Rim_ in her face.

Regina frowns, “Even if that were true, you could most certainly be more right than that mindless violence.”

“We’ll make a believer out of you yet, won’t we?” Emma asks Henry as she fidgets with the television. Even after all this time, Emma never gets it right on the first try.

“Damnit. Henry, where’s the remote, that’s not the right inp-”

It’s a moment of serendipity, that the three of them are watching the television while it plays an advertisement that’s only playing because Emma apparently can’t figure out entertainment technology to save her life. The ad’s one for a casino in Las Vegas and touts its attractions and world-class bar. More importantly, when the scene cuts to the bar, it’s got a bartender minding it and-

The television is still playing, scene cutting away, Regina can see that, and she’s acutely aware that both Henry and Emma are staring at her now, but it’s her, it’s her, she’s alive. It’s Ruby, red streak and all, tending a fucking bar in Las Vegas of all things.

“Regina-” Emma starts but Regina immediately cuts her off, “I have to go,” she says, “I have to go.”

* * *

Granny opens the door with a crossbow in hand to shut the pounding up but her harsh words die on her tongue when she sees Regina, eyes wild and hands wrung out. “I found her,” she says, croaking it out amidst the tears.

Granny just stares.

What does one do when the dead, mourned for and buried, come back to life?

* * *

Regina is ready to drive out of Storybrooke until she rams her Mercedes into the back of whatever car Ruby’s driving these days, she’s that angry it’s taken her this long to even get a hint that Ruby’s alive, as if Ruby had just left this town intending never to look back.

(She did, but magic is to blame for half of it. Regina blames herself for the other.)

Emma and Henry are waiting for her at her car when she returns.

“Get out of my way.” She snaps, refusing to let anyone deter her from this.

“Regina, do you even have a plan?” Emma asks, “Were you just going to drive to Las Vegas? Be realistic, you’d go crazy somewhere in the Midwest. It’s literally hundreds of miles of wheat fields.”

Regina has clearly not thought this through.

“Fortunately for you,” Emma continues, “I am amazing. Here, I’ve printed out your itinerary. Flight leaves in a day from JFK.”

Regina doesn’t have the words for this moment and Emma just winks, “Bring her back, yeah? We’ll throw her a party too.”

Regina isn’t so overwhelmed that she can’t hug Henry and remind him to behave himself. He just rolls his eyes and hugs her back. “Remember to tell her for me,” he whispers to her. Her son, through and through, she thinks.

Granny manages to catch her, right before the town line, standing beside the road. Regina slows to a stop and rolls the window down.

“I’ll bring her back,” Regina promises.

Granny is silent for a moment. “What will you do,” she asks, “if she’s happy?”

Regina doesn’t know and so she can’t answer Granny, just drives away and by the time she looks in her rearview mirror, all she sees is a sign that reads ‘End of Road’.

* * *

In Las Vegas, she finds the bar and the bartender sizes her up when she inquires.

“She’s a popular one, always was. You’re not the first to ask, but you’re the first who don’t look like you’re aiming to do her wrong. Scarlett up and quit I’d say almost half a year ago now? Said she was headed to LA, dunno for what.”

Regina frowns, “Scarlett?”

“Not who you’re looking for?” He looks at the picture again, “That’s her though; she was working here when they filmed that.”

It would explain why she couldn’t find Ruby. There really hadn’t been a Ruby to find in this world.

“No, no it is. Scarlett, was it?”

* * *

She tells herself that Ruby is Scarlett now, when she finally manages to find her in LA at a dive bar that makes the White Rabbit look classy. If Scarlett’s happy, Regina will let things be, she tells herself. She can do that for Ruby (Scarlett, she corrects). She can do that for Scarlett. She’s just going to open this door to see Ruby one last time, to get some closure for both her and Granny.

She fucks it up almost immediately.

It’s Ruby, it can’t be anyone other than Ruby, Ruby who casually leans against the bar without a care in the world and Regina’s heart sinks.

She thought she was ready to have some closure, but it’s Ruby she sees, not Scarlett. She’s too real here, too close, when all Regina’s had for a year are old photographs and evidence of a life never lived.

When she speaks, it is Ruby who speaks Scarlett’s words and it’s salt on the wound that Ruby had left. Regina had refused to let heal and now it is open again, raw and immediate.

She can’t help the hushed “Ruby” that slips out and it damns them both.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have given these two so much thought it's not even funny.
> 
> Part iii is mostly written I swear I'll get it out faster this time.

**Author's Note:**

> I was supposed to be writing something else but this happened and I have a lot of headcanons about Red and how she has to live with the wolf (and am not sure I buy the story's way of having her accept it? But this was also years ago so idr that well).
> 
> idk, I guess basically I think Red has a lot of trauma to work through and there wasn't room for her to work through it in canon and maybe Red/Ruby doesn't know how to work through it and it’s not like there’s anything for her in Storybrooke so she runs and Scarlett doesn't have the same hang-ups or the same burden but all roads lead back to Storybrooke. Thanks, Regina.
> 
> I'm rambling and this is like a long chain of headcanons so I mean if you want to talk about it, I'm on [tumblr](http://boarsnsmores.tumblr.com/) and here but I'm also super shy so maybe message me.


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